Dilip Simeon's blog

The plot was made for front-page headlines and cable-news chyrons: A scientist-turned-political-operative reportedly  hoodwinked Facebook users into giving up personal data  on both themselves and all their friends for research purposes, then used it to develop  “psychographic” profiles on tens of millions of voters —which in turn may have helped the Trump campaign manipulate its way to a historic victory. No wonder Facebook is in deep trouble, right? Investigations are being opened; calls for regulation are mounting; Facebook’s stock plunged 7 percent Monday. FB data scandal is just the beginning Zuckerberg's ambitions over Sensational as it sounds, however, the Cambridge Analytica scandal doesn’t indict Facebook in quite the way it might seem. It reveals almost nothing about the social network or its data policies that wasn’t already widely known, and there’s little evidence of blatant wrongdoing by Facebook or its employees. It’s also far from clear what impa...

There’s been no shortage of shows this century seeking to dissect and expound on the strange natural mysteries of Earth.  David Attenborough  managed to  jumpstart things  with the BBC’s  Blue Planet  back in the day, and then with  Planet Earth . Now, every season seems to herald a new mini-series focused on showing exactly how wondrous and unique our third rock from the sun really is. One Strange Rock , National Geographic Channel’s ten-episode series produced by  Darren Aronofsky  and  Will Smith  (who also doubles as a narrator) is just the latest in this entry, but with a twist: Each episode is hosted by an astronaut who has been to space, using the stories of what they’ve seen and heard and felt while drifting weightlessly in Earth’s orbit to regale Earthlings about the unique home we have, unlike anything we’re likely to discover out in the rest of the universe. “It might be the weirdest place in the universe,” Smith s...

Harsh Mander is a friend of some 40 years’ standing, and on many issues we have stood on the same side. It is, therefore, with some sadness that I must dissent with his recent piece in The Indian Express on Muslim politics. Mander ( ‘ Sonia, sadly ’, IE, March 17 ) quotes a Dalit leader as telling Muslims who come to political meetings: “By all means, come in large numbers to our rallies. But don’t come with your skullcaps and burkas.” He is dismayed by this advice, seeing it as a gratuitous attempt to get “Muslims to voluntarily withdraw from politics”. To the contrary, while the words may be harsh and direct, the spirit of the advice was forward-looking.  Many people, this writer among them, object to Hindus flaunting saffron robes and trishuls at rallies. While a burka may not be a weapon, in a symbolic sense it is akin to a trishul. It represents the most reactionary, antediluvian aspects of the faith. To object to its display in public is a mark not of intolerance, but of...

The 1960 street map of Lagos,  Nigeria , shows a small western-style coastal city surrounded a few semi-rural African villages. Paved roads quickly turn to dirt, and fields to forest. There are few buildings over six floors high and not many cars. No one foresaw what happened next. In just two generations Lagos grew 100-fold, from under 200,000 people to nearly 20 million. Today one of the world’s 10 largest cities, it sprawls across nearly 1,000 sq km. Vastly wealthy in parts, it is largely chaotic and impoverished. Most residents  live in informal settlements, or slums . The great majority are not connected to piped water or a sanitation system. The city’s streets are choked with traffic, its air is full of fumes, and its main dump covers 40 hectares and receives 10,000 metric tons of waste a day. But  new research  suggests that the changes Lagos has seen in the last 60 years may be nothing to what might take place in the next 60. If Nigeria’s popula...

Susan Schnall still remembers the shrieks of  Vietnam  veterans that would ring out at Oak Knell naval hospital throughout the night, as men – some not yet 20 – grappled with the agony of their injuries and the terrible flashbacks of war. It was these screams, and finding herself – a 25-year-old navy nurse – part of an “unconscionable military machine” that fixed men up only to send them straight back into bloody battle, that drove her to one of the great acts of anti-Vietnam war defiance.  In 1968, Schnall hired a small plane with a pilot friend and showered 20,000 flyers over five army bases in San Franscisco, including the docked warship the USS Ranger, urging GIs to join an anti-war demonstration two days later. “I knew that the airforce was dropping flyers on the Vietnamese urging them to get away from the bombing and the spraying of agent orange, and I thought, ‘if the United States can do that there, why can’t we do that here?” said Schnall. Her anti-war state...

The weather in Delhi is finally turning, as is public opinion in India. The bluster and gloating is gone. Three and a half years into the Modi government, those who never liked the BJP are furious and openly derisive. Those who wanted to give it a chance have lost patience, and are openly derisive. Traders and shop owners, core BJP constituents, practically spit their disappointment, and are openly derisive. Social media is openly derisive. Even the shouty trolls have gone quiet. On Dussehra, Prime Minister Modi provided the perfect visual metaphor for why this is so: He raised a bow to shoot an arrow into the effigy of Ravan, failed twice, then just threw the arrow a lame couple of feet. A grand set-up for an embarrassing flop. The cartoons just draw themselves. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) seems to have squandered its massive political mandate. Rampaging all over the electoral map off a springboard of public opinion made of similar disappointment and derision aime...

Debt: The first five thousand years Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions -- whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law -- that place controls on debt's potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common...